Donuts Has Not Increased Domain Name Renewal Fees

Donuts made the 4th post today about the New gTLD renewal rate but the news were probably about the Donuts renewals fees.

Also the .Guru domain names registered the day after general availability have a <=60% renewal rate.

 

This is the first post they did where the renewal rate was 91.6% and the second post with a 85.3% rate. In the third post the overall renewal rate was 74%.

Donuts today says:

As of today, 37,857 Donuts domains have passed through their renewal cycle and 71.0% of those names were renewed by the registrant. They are from the .BIKE, .CAMERA, .CLOTHING, .EQUIPMENT, .ESTATE .GALLERY,.GRAPHICS, .GURU, .HOLDINGS, .LIGHTING, .PHOTOGRAPHY, .PLUMBING, .SINGLES and .VENTURES TLDs. Very few of the 37,857 names were bought during Sunrise or the Early Access Period (EAP).

The renewal rate on the 4th batch of the 8595 domains added is at about 61% renewal rate. Close to 3,000 of the total 37,857 domains were bought during Sunrise or the Early Access Period (EAP).

These domains include a few EAP domains from the second batch of the 7 new gtlds that Donuts launched. So probably the overall renewal rate after general availability is close to 60% and I think that .guru must be bringing down the overall rate. ie .Guru must be lower than 60%.

Donuts also said that no Donuts domain has a renewal price that is greater than its initial registration price and that no all domains were renewed at full price. i.e. No discounts were given.

All domains were purchased and renewed at full price (retail prices were typically $30 to $50 per year) and no Donuts domain has a renewal price that is greater than its initial registration price.

NameStats showed that .guru lost 1,624 domain names on Friday and another 1,115 on Saturday, 1,167 names on Sunday and 725 domains on Monday and another 597 today because of expiring domains that were removed from the zone file. To be fair these number do not mean that all these domains will be dropped. But it means that the domains have not been renewed up until today and the registrars are either putting the domains on hold or dropping them.

.Guru now has 73,085 domains after losing domains for 14 consecutive days.

.Guru last high was on the 26th of February when it had 80,274 domain names.

Only 10% of all .Guru domains had been renewed, 1 month before the 1 year anniversary.

After the report I did I thought that a 50% renewal rate will a great result for .guru. We’ll wait and see. Of course I was talking about the complete 2014 zone file and not just sunrise and EAP and even General Availability day.

Here are the results of the “Are You Renewing Your New gTLD Domains?” poll that had over 500 votes.